Paint Fumes and Beans
by elanev91
Summary: Early one December morning, James and Lily find out that they're going to have a baby. James spends the next nine months nesting so hard that it's a wonder Lily doesn't kill him.


**I was watching my favourite YouTubers the other day and I basically stole this idea from their lives. I am not sorry.**

 **Also, I literally laughed to myself the whole time editing this thinking 'breeder nonsense omg' but here we are anyway.**

* * *

James Potter was losing touch with reality.

Really, he was absolutely losing his sanity.

Lily was having a baby, _a baby_ , and he was absolutely unhinged.

He wasn't neurotic for all the reasons you might expect. He wasn't terrified of becoming a father (if anything, he was excited, stupidly excited, over the top, can barely breathe because of it excited), he wasn't plotting ways to fake his own death and change his name and avoid responsibility — no, James Potter was losing his grip on reality because the baby, their baby, was coming right fucking now and nothing, _nothing,_ was ready.

They'd only moved into this house a year ago, this little cottage overlooking the sea where they'd thought it would be perfect to eventually raise a family. They thought they'd had all the time in the world — all the time to get the walls painted and the floors refinished and the house looking just the way they wanted it to — but then _eventually_ became _next fucking year_ and James didn't know what to do with himself.

They found out that Lily was pregnant early one bitterly cold December morning. James went to the shop that very day and rented a floor sander and stain and varnish and spent the next two weeks refinishing every floor in the house.

Lily had been — mostly — tolerant of James and his home improvement schemes at the beginning. She was mildly annoyed with him when whole swathes of the house were out of bounds while he stained and painted and hung new wainscoting, was a bit more than annoyed about the fact that they had to open all their windows in the middle of winter so they didn't suffocate from the fumes. She got used to coming home from work and finding James in one chaotic state or another — sometimes the house echoed with the rhythmic bursts of James' nail gun as he hung new moulding in every room of the house, other times Lily was opening another goddamn window because James was repainting the lounge because 'We used this eggshell, but it's too shiny and we wanted a matte finish and I know it's going to be harder to clean once the baby gets here, but, look, I have all this extra paint and we can just touch it up!'

Sometimes he caught her looking at him like she was reminding herself that she loved him and then he backed off for a while.

Until he remembered how drafty the windows were in the room they were planning to convert into the nursery and he spent the entire day measuring and cutting up the 'most high quality silicon weather stripping they sell at B&Q' so that the baby wouldn't freeze to death in the wintertime because 'Lil, you know we get that icy wind off the ocean in the winter sometimes'.

Lily was quick to point out that they rarely, if ever, got icy wind off the ocean, but she was grateful that he'd taken the time to fix the windows all the same.

It just didn't make sense to him that Lily wasn't going absolutely mad with worry. Maybe she was — she was always the better of the two of them at keeping a cool head under pressure — but James knew her better than he knew himself and she didn't really seem that nervous.

Sure, they sometimes talked about what would happen after — what raising a baby would be like, especially with the world being what it was, if giving birth would be as wretched as she always imagined it would be — but whenever James brought up the absolute _disaster area_ that was their house, Lily always just laughed him off.

'James, the house is perfect.'

They were lying in bed late in Lily's second trimester. James was fretting, again, about paint, and Lily was _trying_ to be a good sport (really, he could tell, she was putting in a lot of effort, and he was trying not to talk about it but he really couldn't help it) but James knew that she was starting to get a bit exasperated with him.

James ran his hand over her stomach, watched for a moment as he traced patterns over her skin. Lily had been so self-conscious about this part of her at first, so worried about the ways that she would change. She'd worried about stretch marks and lines and discoloration and all these things that James had never once even thought of.

She was always so beautiful.

'It's — Lil, we still have so much to do.'

Lily was about to answer when she started and grabbed his hand, slid it up near her ribs. And he felt it, there underneath his hand — he hadn't realised what it was, that soft flutter under her skin, not when his hand was so far away, but now that Lily had pointed him to the right spot —

He looked up from their hands and she was beaming when their eyes met.

James swallowed. 'What colour should we paint the baby's room?'

Lily sighed. 'What colour is it right now?'

'Grey.'

'Perfect.'

James sighed, exasperated. 'But don't you want to brighten it up a little? Maybe I could do an accent wall? What colour do you think would look nice with that grey?'

'Grey.'

James huffed. 'Lily.'

' _James_. The grey is fine. The baby isn't going to have a _single_ colour preference and no matter what decor we finally choose, the grey will look lovely.'

'Are you sure? What if —'

'Yes, James, I'm sure. And anyway, I'm tired of the house smelling like paint fumes. If you pick up one more goddamn paint brush, I'm going to throw all your painting things into the ocean.'

James smirked. 'You and I both know you couldn't stand to pollute like that, Evans.'

'I'll come to terms with it if I have to.'

The baby kicked against James' palm again and he looked back down at their hands. They were quiet for a minute.

'Can you believe that there's a baby in there?' Lily asked. Her voice was quiet, a little reverent, and James slid closer to her on the mattress. 'Like an honest to god, we fucking made that baby?'

James snorted. 'That's what we should tell the baby when they're older. "You're our honest to god, we fucking made that child, and you're going to go clean up your room right now".'

Lily grinned. 'If you don't say that at least once, I'm going to be really disappointed.'

'If the baby is anything like me, I'm sure we'll be telling them to clean their room all the damn time.'

'God, I know,' Lily moved her hand from his, reached up and threaded her fingers through the hair at the base of James' neck. 'Living with you is like living with a human tornado.'

James slid his hand to her back and his mouth hitched up into a smirk. 'But a very handsome human tornado.'

Lily was still laughing when she leant forward and kissed him.

James finally finished the house early in Lily's third trimester — sure, she still came home sometimes to find him cutting holes in the wall in the nursery to drop wires behind the plasterboard so the baby didn't accidentally _Jude the Obscure_ itself on the cord for the fancy baby monitor they had to have — but the house was finally together and James was finally relaxed.

Until they went to that fucking Waterstones one Saturday in May and he found a copy of _Fix, Freeze, Feast_ (and _Good Food: Family Freezer Meals_ and _Seriously Good Freezer Meals_ and _The Everything Freezer Meals Cookbook_ ).

He hadn't even _thought_ about this before — what they would eat when the baby came — because he'd just assumed (foolishly) that they'd have time to cook and eat like they always did. But then he realised that, no, the baby was going to be keeping them up at all hours, their schedules were going to be completely out of whack, and they weren't even going to want to _shower_ most days, let alone cook a dinner that was even remotely healthy for them.

The baby was going to be relying on them for absolutely everything — they couldn't subsist on fucking takeaway.

He bought a set of sticky flags and started marking all the recipes he thought they might enjoy. He bought loads ( _loads_ ) of ingredients (James thought Lily might kill him one day when he came home from Tesco with an entire shopping bag full of tinned beans they needed for a reason that, when pressed, James couldn't quite articulate) and set about preparing as many frozen meals as he possibly could. He made curries, pies, and baked pasta dishes, he made huge batches of pasta sauce and marinated so much chicken that he could barely stand to even think about chicken for a week.

He was in the middle of another such preparation storm about a month out from Lily's due date. Lily'd gone upstairs to take a nap — the baby had taken to kicking the hell out of her spine the last few weeks and no matter what she did, she just couldn't get comfortable. They'd tried everything they could think of — that fancy pillow everyone seemed to love, trying to shift the baby around in there, asking them nicely to please move so Lily could get some sleep, but nothing worked.

Lily was miserable and James had never felt more helpless in all his life.

He was flipping through _Everything Freezer Meals_ again, checking back through to see if there was anything he wanted to try his hand at that he already hadn't made and frozen, when he stumbled upon a lasagna recipe. He hadn't had lasagna in — god, he couldn't even remember how long, and this wasn't one of the recipes that he and Lily had talked about a while back at dinner when they'd gone through all the recipes he'd marked and she'd signed off or vetoed. He couldn't remember when he'd marked this down, but it had to have been after that because he couldn't remember talking to her about it and, come to think of it, he didn't really know if she even liked lasagna.

How didn't he know that about her?

James left the book open on the worktop and strode quickly through the house.

She was lying on her side facing away from him when James walked into their room a minute later.

'Lil.'

Lily grunted and shifted her head against the pillow.

He really should just leave.

' _Lil._ '

'What?' Her voice was scratchy from sleep and she was very clearly annoyed. He probably should've left, said never mind, but he couldn't help himself.

And besides, she was already awake now.

'How do you feel about lasagna?'

Lily turned her head just enough to shoot him a look, though the effect was slightly hampered by the fact that her eyes were half closed. 'What?'

'Lasagna,' James said. ' _Everything Freezer Meals_ has a recipe and —'

'For fucks sake, James,' Lily rolled back over, 'you did not just wake me up to talk about food prep.'

'I know, I'm sorry, but I don't want to make a whole bunch and then you don't like it. And I should know if you like it or not, I mean we're married for fucks sake, but I've realised, in all the time we've been together we haven't once had lasagna. I know you like spaghetti and other kinds of pasta, but I wasn't sure about lasagna and so I thought —'

'James.' Lily rolled back over again, struggling to shift her body on the mattress so that she could face him fully this time. 'Go ahead and make the lasagna. Make as many as you like. But if you wake me up again when I'm trying to nap because this fucking baby is finally laying still — James, I love you, but I will fucking _end_ you.'

James, wisely, leaned down, pressed a kiss to her forehead, and ran out of the room.

James tried his best to keep it together as they rolled on into the final days of Lily's pregnancy. He tried to remind himself that he'd spent the better part of the last six months doing everything he could to make sure that the house was ready and Lily was happy and well and they'd taken all the classes on parenting they possibly could because neither of them knew what they were doing. They had the nursery set up — they'd bought the cot ages ago and Lily had washed and folded all the clothes in a nesting fit the week before and the door had been closed ever since to keep the cat out because they found him curled up in the armchair just shedding hair _everywhere_ and they'd both about had a stroke — and the freezer was stocked and their hospital bags were packed and, really, there was nothing left to do but wait.

Waiting, though, might have been the worst part.

Because at least when he was painting or tiling the bathroom or hanging moulding, James had something to do. When he was at Tesco every other day buying tinned vegetables and fruit to cut and freeze, he could refocus his mind on something that wasn't the fact that they were, very soon, going to have a baby that they were going to have to keep alive.

They were going to be responsible for another human being. A human being that was going to go out into the world and treat other people the way that they taught them to treat people.

They should have been required to pass some kind of test or something before they were allowed to do this because there was no way in _hell_ that they were ready for that kind of responsibility.

He channeled some of his energy — not too much because he didn't want her to kill him — on trying to ease what he could of Lily's discomfort. He couldn't make the weather cooler, he couldn't make her back hurt less, he couldn't do most things, but he could take her down to the sea in the evening, when the sun had gone down behind the clouds and the breeze had picked up, and he could rub her feet and make her her favourite things to eat and bring her cups of tea that they both pretended were caffeinated. He couldn't do much for her, not now that the house was done and the fridge was full and all they had to do was wait for the baby to decide to be born, but he could do these little things, and even though they never felt like much, Lily still seemed to appreciate them.

Then, all of a sudden, it was the end of July and Lily was waking him up with a sharp nudge in the ribs and James nearly had a heart attack.

They weren't ready.

He wasn't ready.

They had hours to wait, hours in the hospital to pace back and forth and, for a while, play cards. They were at the hospital for so long that James' stomach started an all-out revolt against the rest of him because Lily couldn't eat and so he was refusing to eat because it wasn't fair. They shared Lily's ice chips for a while until she finally got so tired of listening to his stomach curling in on itself that she sent him to the canteen and told him that he wasn't allowed back until he'd eaten something.

If James thought he'd felt helpless before, when Lily's back was sore and her ankles were swollen and she couldn't get comfortable in bed, it was nothing to how absolutely helpless he felt when Lily was in labour.

She was clearly in pain, clearly aggravated with him for having the _audacity_ to do this to her, and he couldn't make anything better and it was on the verge of driving him out of his bloody mind, but he had to stay calm, had to do it for her because Lily, for once, was the one that couldn't keep it together, the one who was spiralling out of control from the pressure and the pain and everything the fuck else.

He took her hand. He mimicked the breathing that coach had taught them. He wiped her forehead, let her squeeze his hand until he couldn't feel it, told her that he loved her, she was amazing, it was almost over.

And then the baby was born and they rushed him, _him,_ over to that warmer in the corner and Lily begged James to go check, to count his fingers and toes and make sure that he was alright. The baby was screaming at the top of his lungs and they knew he was fine, James could feel it in his chest, just how fine he was, but he went to check anyway because he couldn't refuse Lily anything.

'He's got all his toes,' James said, and he realised there were tears rolling down his cheeks as he watched the nurse measure and weigh him and stamp his feet onto some paper lying at the end of the warmer. 'I think all his fingers, but I can't tell because he won't sit still.'

Lily laughed from the bed. 'Already so much like you.'

James turned and smiled at her, a wide, silly smile that was nowhere near enough to tell her just how unbearably happy he was.

'Would you like to hold him?'

James whipped back around. The nurse was holding the baby out in his arms, a tiny little bundle wrapped in a soft white blanket, and James nodded.

His hands were shaking, but his arms were steady. The nurse settled the baby into the crook of his arm and James tucked him close to his chest.

He was — he was —

James looked up and he couldn't quite see properly through the tears in his eyes, but Lily was crying too and so it didn't matter that he couldn't see because neither of them could bloody see. He shifted the baby carefully into one arm, held him just a little closer to his chest, and reached up under his glasses to wipe the tears out of his eyes before he stepped over to the bed and took Lily's hand.

'Lil.' He couldn't think of anything to say, couldn't think of the words that would mean anything close to the feeling he had in his chest. It was like his entire universe had just been upended and his heart had expanded and his ribs could barely contain it.

Everything was different. Everything was different and it was more than he'd ever thought it would be.

Lily seemed to understand. She nodded, sucked in a sharp, stuttering breath. 'I know.'

'Our son.' James squeezed her hand and he hoped she could understand him, thick as his voice was now that he was trying desperately to keep from sobbing outright.

'Our honest to god, we fucking made that son,' Lily said. James laughed, an overwhelmed, watery sort of laugh, and he reached up, brushed the tears off of Lily's cheeks.

'Yeah we fucking did.'

Lily patted the space next to her and there wasn't much room, but James settled himself on the edge of the bed, moving the baby in his arms so that he was set between them. Lily immediately reached down and brushed a piece of hair out of the baby's eyes, smiled when she turned and did the same to James. He leaned down and pressed his lips to her forehead.

'He's got so much hair,' she said, her breath hot against James' neck. 'I wonder where he gets it.'

James chuckled against her forehead before he sat up and grinned down at her. 'Haven't the foggiest.'

Lily leaned her head over onto James' shoulder and James pressed a kiss to her hair.

They were quiet for a minute.

'Do you want to hold him?' James' voice was quiet. 'Do that skin to skin thing we read about?'

Lily shifted on his shoulder. 'In a minute. I want to rest for a sec.'

He nodded. Kissed her head. Ran his thumb along the blanket where the baby's arm would be.

It was mad how quiet everything seemed — how the beeping monitors and the nursing bustling about and the rapid fire of his own thoughts fell away. He'd been so worried for so long and he hadn't realised how loud it had been in his mind until it wasn't there anymore. Until it was Lily and the baby and everything was quiet.

He knew that the days and weeks and months to come would present their own challenges, that they'd have to figure out things he and Lily had never thought about before. But there was something about this moment, this calm, that told him they'd be alright. It settled deep in his gut, grounded him.

The baby started wiggling in his arms and James reached up, carefully pulled the blanket down from around him so that his arms could come free. He made a soft, disgruntled little sound, and James hummed, reached down and ran his finger along the back of the baby's hand.

'You're alright, mate,' James' voice was quiet, barely more than a whisper. 'We've got you.'


End file.
